ILLUMINATION

Today represents a landmark occasion in the history of broadcast media, the history of art, and humanity in general. For it is the day that we unveil the long-awaited, slaved-over, soon-to-be-reviled, epoch-making, sense-enhancing, mutually-exclusive, mystic-mongering, profoundly abstruse, esoterically erudite, hermetically obscure, adverbally adjectival opus THE PRETENTIOUS FILM: THE MOST PRETENTIOUS FILM ON EARTH. It is directed by Tom Gubernat, auteur of the ages. Don’t even pretend your life hasn’t been changed.

INTERROGATION (I): NIHILS

We recently posed a series of questions to all of our Pretentious shows, so you, the readers, can get an idea how to mentally prepare yourselves for the artistic onslaught they will endeavor to provide. The following responses were provided by the estimable Mr. Trav S.D., author of the vaudeville history No Applause, Just Throw Money and the inventor of quoits. His show Nihils will open on June 16.

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
To paraphrase the blind lounge singer in Airport ’77, pretentiousness is “in the eyes of the beholder.” The Latin root from which the word springs means literally “holding [something] in front of oneself.” In a sense, all speech, all representation, is a similar feint, or dodge – a “shield” of (non)communication behind which to hide. Falsity and mask are the nature of the beast. The pretentiousness (or unpretentiousness… tentiousness?) of the current work is a matter of degree, then, not of kind. To grossly misrepresent a remark of Bertrand Russell’s: “If I am not pretentious…what am I?’

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
Baudrillard, Foucault, Bazin, Kant, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Becket, T.S. Elliot, the Beats, Jim Morrison, Gertrude Stein, Sartre, Kierkegard, Nietzsche, Byron, Blake, Heidegger, Artaud, Adolphe Appia, Marshall McLuhan, Christian Metz, Stephen Hawking, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Robert Oppenheimer, Lenny Bruce, the Velvet Underground, Jerry Lewis, Brecht & Max Reinhardt.

The late Roland Barthes once wrote “For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.” Explicate.
Theatre must not only address man’s primal nature, but his primate nature. Before man was pretensile, he was prehensile. The first theatrical audiences were austrolopithicenes, circa one million B.C. Savannah-dwellers mainly, they would periodically return to their Edenic mother, the arboreal habitat from which they sprang. Ensconced in the canopy, they would munch fruit and watch specialized members of their community enact rude frolics not substantially different from modern rock concerts, wrestling matches, and situation comedies. The long arms to which Barthes refers apply not so much to the performer as to the audience, who must rely on these appendages to ascend and navigate the branches…and (being prelingual) gesticulate their approval or disapproval of the performance. (This, too, some speculate, is the origin of clapping. Thalidomide babies and others can attest – when your arms are too short, you cannot clap.)

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
If I have not already alienated the audience with my last sentence, then there is nowhere to go but down. As for the performance, I don’t wish to tip my hand too much. Suffice it to say that the entire piece is composed of “cells” or “units” of alienation, based upon the principle of the Hegelian dialectic. From first to last, from Alpha to Omega, there is no theatrical moment within the piece that does not fold in against itself, in implied or self-evident replication of the Curved Space Theory.

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
Myself. Those who see the piece will be the first to agree – surely I am my own worst enemy.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
I intend to send an American Indian in my stead, who will give a brief speech about the historical mistreatment of his people.

VENDITION

Though we prefer to consider ourself above such pettiness, we cannot deny that we are members of a mercantile society. As such, tickets are now on sale for all Pretentious Festival shows. We invite the hoi polloi to hand us their hard-earned wages in exchange for the privilege of enlightenment. They may do so at

www.bricktheater.com/pretentious

or

HERE.

We advise you to beat your drums, raise your flags, and mobilize the masses - to such degree as you can manage to do so without ruffling your hard-won sense of icy self-regard.

ILLUSTRATION (I)

In February, we at the Pretentious Festival embarked upon what is destined to be among the most influential projects in the canon of post-post-modern art: the creation of Pretentious Imagery. A short film is in the offing, and a number of photos were taken (by one Tim Brown) of Pretentious goings-on at The Brick, featuring a number of Pretentious Artists who will be featured in our Festival. We will sporadically share this imagery with you, starting today. Click each image for full glory, and attempt to enjoy.

ALTERATION

It has just come to our attention that one of our productions, formerly entitled ULTIMO: THE LAST ONE-MAN SHOW is changing its title to ROCKBERRY: THE LAST ONE-MAN SHOW (A PLAY). To reflect this shift, we would like to include a new anagram (featuring only the main title, because otherwise it's too damn long). Actually, I'm not sure which I prefer:

CRY, BROKER!

or

ERR BY ROCK

Probably the first one, huh?

ANNOUNCEMENT

The satisfaction we take in our work is only of the grimmest variety. We are working from a mandate that surpasses everyday activity, making such activities as "bloggery" a distasteful chore at best. But in order to reach our intended audience of three or four worthy, enlightened individuals, compromises must be made.

Please take note of the Announcement of Our Pretentious Shows, findable on bricktheater.com. The information that you seek will reside there in its clearest form. However, for those individuals that, like us, prefer to view factual information through more challenging lenses, we present the following list of show titles in anagram form. As you decipher your own show or the shows of others in the list, please attempt to enjoy.

THE 1 BATHED Q[U]ALM
ACCELERATED INK ZIP JOTS ON A HEM
AESTHETICS SHIT OP
BOGGLE A HIP GENTEEL CAD VENTING TIN MIRTH
A CAD NOW RUNS TO EYETEETH PRIMERS
CECA: A MILLINER UPROOTS US
CLEARHEADED GINSENG: A NEON LENT
A COFFINED FURL TRUTH
CROP JET 365
FLEETEST DEB, OH, WE GONG
GEE, HI! KILL WOOL STORMS ON
HIS NIL
HI TO MY SMUT REFERENCE
HIM WIN A LAST HELL
I MOULT
IN THONG
A MACERATED DIM LIMO LIES
THE PRETEEN TOURIST: A CAB
RABBI CRACK
SLITHERY ENGINEER CEDE A THIN TRIP
A SOY-PROOF SUN ACCLIMATES/SEXY FORD FIN
A TOM WHO BEWITCH TURDS
TRY A WRY RIPE VELVETEEN
A TWIN IN TRIM SEETHES HEARTACHES
VENIAL GENE
A VINO AGE ROTS WORRY
VIOLENT NUNS I
WET DORK RUINS YUKS
WHEREVER I HUNT IT: A HOT WIT

ACCEPTANCE

It is with grim satisfaction that we prepare to announce the discrete quanta of stage-based probing that have been selected to perform in The Brick Theater’s Pretentious Festival in June of 2007.

Many interlocuters will no doubt raise the query: how was this particular aggregation of spectacles designated for public exhibition? The full span of secrets regarding our process, in addition to causing severe bafflement for the vast majority of readers, are subject to intense proprietary protectiveness. However, we can allow you access to a few choice details of our modus operandi.

One of the first tasks executed was a close chemical analysis of the papers on which the applications arrived. If the molecular makeup of these sheets did not meet our exacting standards, the offending rags were picked up with magnesium tongs and deposited in a chrome wastebin.

More important was our examination of each application’s aura. The committee counted among its membership a licensed aura expert, who would sleep with each application under her pillow at night, offering a full report in the morning of what colors she dreamt of. An intricate spectral calculus ensued, which often spelled the difference between wholehearted embrace and sneering dismissal.

Finally, we questioned the contents of each application. We asked ourselves: would an average audience member pay hard-earned money to sit and watch this work? If the answer was no, the application had an excellent shot at being accepted.

Myriad other analyses and substantiations were exercised as we made our final decisions. As the artists’ grateful, cringing responses trickle in, we are preparing to post them en masse, for your discernment.